Why Troops Avoid A Fight

Soldiers won’t follow clueless leaders into battles they can’t win

In April 1970, our brigade commander ordered each of his three line infantry battalions to deploy squad-sized ambushes along the border with Cambodia (which looked like an angel’s wing on the map). This tactic would allow the brigade to completely block the infiltration of North Vietnamese Army (NVA) units from Cambodia into South Vietnam. Following the order, a squad-sized unit was hunkered down in ambush positions every 500 meters near the border in the brigade sector.

At this time, I was the battalion acting operations officer, having just given up command of a rifle company. The brigade commander’s clever tactic was a complete flop. Several company-sized NVA units crossed through our lines over a couple days. Our young “shake-and-bake” squad leaders would call in the NVA movements, sometimes after they passed literally through their ambush sites so as to not alert the NVA soldiers. Not a single ambush was sprung by our troops.

The brigade commander and his staff lived in a compound in the Division Base Camp at Cu Chi. They were in an ivory tower of reports, radio traffic, map boards, and meals prepared and served by local Vietnamese in their officers’ mess. So removed from the war, how could they have known this plan would fail completely?

They could not know unless they had led at the platoon or company level. Then they would have understood that in order for an infantry unit to initiate offensive action, several conditions must be met. First, the unit had to have either an officer or a hard-charging non-commissioned officer as a leader. Then they had to have a medic, a machine gun and at least two radio operators (to assure one of the two would work to call for Medevac or close air support). The squads deployed by brigade usually had one radio, and about one in three did not have an M-60 machine gun. And finally, the leader had to have some sense that they had a fair chance at a win. This would not be the case for the seven of our soldiers huddled behind the rice paddy dike facing 100 NVA regulars. Most of the troops in our units were draftees. While they would fight bravely, they expected their leaders to give them a fighting chance to win.

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